The Truth of the Matter Page 4

  Agnes and Will had known each other all their lives, had played together as children. The habit of knowing Will was so deep-rooted that it hadn’t occurred to her in a long, long time that he was a nice-looking man, with pale arched brows which gave him a misleading expression of amused skepticism. He was entirely appealing, although not with the sort of striking good looks Warren Scofield had possessed. And, even though he had wit of a sort and a sense of humor, he didn’t rely much on irony; he didn’t have the slight cynicism of a man who is charming. He was easygoing and dependably kind.

  As he crossed the yard and turned the corner of the house, however, Agnes was overtaken by weariness as she made her way through the darkened front rooms to let him in the kitchen door. It had been a mistake to call him so late. It had been a mistake to invite him. Now he and she would sit and talk and have a drink. She had forgotten all about that. She had only been counting on the pleasures and comforts of familiar sex; she had only been thinking of making love. The inevitable social aspect of the evening hadn’t crossed her mind, and she despaired of the effort she would have to make. She thought it might be impossible to summon the energy to be alert and curious and hospitable. He greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and an apologetic laugh as well, because his arms were filled with all sorts of things he’d brought for her from the farm and from a recent trip to Cleveland.

  She smiled at him even as she longed to tell him to go home—she longed to be able to turn him away without any explanation and without hurting his feelings. But she smiled on and, one by one, took the packages from him and exclaimed over and remarked upon each of them. “I feel guilty every time you bring me all these things,” she said. “Not as guilty as I should feel, I guess, or I wouldn’t accept them. Betts used to accuse me of being smug! She said people were going to think I was buying all this on the black market.” Agnes was teasingly chipper and genuinely appreciative, too, but she was aware that her perkiness sounded forced. “I don’t think I’d really mind if that’s what people did think. It would give me a more . . . well . . . it would give me a reputation.” While Agnes put away the sugar and baking chocolate, the meat and the butter and eggs he had brought along, Will fixed himself a drink of the good Scotch he had bought in Cleveland, and he made a drink for Agnes, too.

  Will had served on the board of the Midwest Agricultural Council since its inception, just after the start of the war, and it had become an onerous and time-consuming business. They sat at the kitchen table, and Agnes listened to him talk wearily about the three-day board meeting in Cleveland that had kept him out of town longer than he expected. “. . . I don’t see how we can manage it with transportation compromised. We’ll have a priority status, but not high enough . . . it may be we’ll have to depend on trucks instead of the trains. Coordinated distribution of enriched fertilizer. And, I’ll tell you, I don’t see how else we’re going to get our quota. There’s more profit in other things. It won’t go down well, but we’re thinking we might have to make it mandatory to plant at least one-quarter acreage in hybrid corn.”

  He also filled her in on what was happening at the farm—which was a huge enterprise by now, and which Will had bought from Agnes’s father. She had grown up in the house in which Will now lived. But Will was not a farmer, really, although he raised livestock and vegetables for the small local market and for himself. Essentially, though, he was the manager of a complex and thriving business that produced corn. Agnes was not uninterested, but her mind wandered, going blank for moments at a time until she dragged it back to attention once again.

  “. . . not the way I see things,” Will was saying. “If they really don’t have it, that’s fine! But we stood there dickering over the price when we all three knew it was just sitting in the warehouse. Had been for a long time. They think I’m going to order that lumber again and pay the price it costs now. They think I’ll do that. They think I’d fall for that kind of nonsense. It’s disappointing, Agnes. What they don’t know is I’m the kind of man who won’t argue with them. Once I’m disgusted with a thing, I just don’t fool with it anymore. So if I don’t hear from them by midweek, I’ll just go over to Grundy’s, even if I have to pay more. That’s just the kind of person I am. And I’ll bet you that for a couple of months Andy won’t even realize I’m not doing business with them anymore.”

  Finally they closed up downstairs and went to bed, and Agnes pretended an enthusiasm for the prospect of making love that she no longer had, although she felt perfectly amiable toward Will in the shadowy, snow-lit bedroom. And eventually she lost track of her initial indifference and fell into a loosening of concentration on anything other than his and her own physical selves. She fell asleep not long after he did, comfortable alongside him, and for the most part untroubled.

  She woke up gradually when daylight only illuminated the rectangles of the windows behind their drawn shades and frilled curtains, and she watched drowsily as the various objects in the room regained their angles, were clarified for another day. Eventually, in a moment she failed to note, the floor, the braided rug, the chair where Will had neatly draped his clothes, her dressing table with its tall oval mirror, were marked by the faint tic-tac-toe shadow of the window mullions. If just once she caught that instant . . . But today she found herself oddly pleased that again that tiny flick of time had eluded her. It was a bit of magic thinking she indulged in every morning; if she ever observed that exact instant when the shadows materialized, then everything good she might have hoped for would come to pass; if she failed to catch it once again, she could only expect the unexpected. She decided this morning, though, that her failure to note the moment might augur nice surprises in spite of everything—the war, her finances, the empty house.

  Not wanting to wake Will, she pulled on her robe and hurried downstairs to the basement in the morning chill and stoked the furnace, since Howard wasn’t at home to do it. It wasn’t a particularly difficult task, but it was a dirty one, and Agnes was always uneasy in the dank basement, where a large black snake resided, according to Howard, although she thought surely it must hibernate in the winter. Howard had also said that the snake was shy and harmless, and was a good sign that they wouldn’t be bothered with mice, but Agnes had been unable to persuade herself that she was glad it was there. In fact, she hastily clinkered the grate and shoveled in coal and decided it was worth paying the Drummonds’ grandson, from across the square, to come in early and tend to the job before he was off to school. By the time she reached the upper landing of the second floor on her way back upstairs, she heard the thud and whoof of the heat coming up. She kicked off her slippers and stood barefoot on the hall grate in the warm rush of air. Her whole body, which had tensed against the cold, began to relax, and she stayed where she was until the soles of her feet became so hot that she had to step on and off the brass vent.

  Will was still sound asleep, but he had turned and stretched and was splayed across the entire bed, and she didn’t want to disturb him. With all the children gone, the night before was the first time she and Will had slept overnight in her bed. Anyone seeing him leave this morning would not have seen him arrive last night, and they would only think he had been in town early on some errand or other. It seemed to Agnes that his staying over was an intimacy greater than merely making love. In fact, she felt constrained somehow when she considered this development, and uncertain whether or not it was something that she would want him to make a habit of. On the other hand, this first morning of 1945, she was filled with more than her usual fondness toward Will. She wanted to be especially careful of his feelings; she felt an urge to protect him, though what hazard might be bearing down upon him she couldn’t imagine. If he hadn’t dropped whatever he might have been doing and come into town the night before, though, she knew that even the thought of going to bed with any expectation of falling asleep would have been hopeless.

  And he had been as thoughtful as usual, bringing all sorts of things from the farm, even the winesap apples she loved so m
uch, which he must have stored in the root cellar in the fall so they would keep. But as she quietly got dressed and went downstairs to make coffee and start the bacon, she realized that—although she was hungry—the toast and jam, the bacon, the fresh eggs Will had brought from the farm, those apples—cored, sliced and slowly simmered in butter with a little sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg that she thought he’d like—they weren’t going to satisfy her. They weren’t what she was hungry for, although she couldn’t think of anything else she wanted to eat.

  There was plenty to do while school wasn’t in session, and Agnes kept busy. There was so much closet space now, in the children’s bedrooms, that she brought her spring clothes down from the attic, washed and ironed them, and hung them in Howard’s closet. It was sensible and satisfying to have all her clothes at hand in case an unseasonably warm day came along. She prepared next term’s lesson plans in the afternoons, and in the evenings she generally played cards next door at Lily and Robert’s, or joined them to listen to the news or sometimes to a concert or variety show.

  All through the few days at home Agnes instinctively—and as best she could—held at bay any moment of retrospection. What she intended for the time being was to let any ideas that might unsettle her simply float above her consciousness. She was dogged in her determination not to allow any disturbance to wend its way too soon into her stream of thought, believing that the longer she could simply acknowledge the concealment of sorrow and regret or remorse within the other, ordinary thoughts of any given day—well—the better off she’d be in the long run; the better off she’d be the more time went by.

  Monday, January eighth, was the first day back at school after the Christmas recess. While her second-graders did copy work off the board, Agnes pinned up cutouts of animals that hibernate, which she had clipped from old calendars and magazines to decorate the cork-paneled strip over the blackboard. She stood stocking-footed on a chair, stretching upward almost on tiptoe so that she could use both hands to align the diaphanous wisps of paper satisfactorily before thumbtacking them in place.

  In the familiarity of her schoolroom, though, and with her mind not wholly absorbed by the task at hand, her watchful discipline of mind simply slipped away, and she was ambushed by the melancholy that had shadowed her since Howard had climbed aboard the bus on his way to Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania; had shadowed her, in fact, since her husband’s death, but which the busy-ness of life with her children had ameliorated to a degree.

  Before she could get hold of it—take account of and suppress it—that sorrow blossomed into full-fledged grief. Not sadness or any permutation of mere despondency. Nothing contained or governable. It inhabited the entire architecture of her consciousness. Just like that! While she was pinning up the cutout of a gopher. It was as if she had had the breath knocked out of her. Agnes had religiously rationalized the children’s having gone, had told herself over and over that they would be safe, that they would all come home, but she lacked the information she needed to imagine their lives. Increasingly she seemed able only to conjure them up as no more than representations of themselves, like overexposed images in a photograph, or people remembered from a dream. But now, just at a moment when she wasn’t paying attention, grief overtook her once again.

  After Warren’s death, Lily had offered bits of hopeful consolation now and then. She had said often that it was terrible for her and Robert, too, to have lost Warren. That she couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Agnes. Agnes, though, discovered that the sudden blow of loss was terrible, but it was not as devastating in the moment as the slow hours and days, the weeks, and months of becoming increasingly convinced of the endlessness of that absence.

  She stood in the over-warm classroom on the chair, helpless and mortified and unable to stop the sudden tears that slid silently down her face and then were accompanied by a sort of weeping she couldn’t restrain. And, in fact, she was unaware of taking a sharp, teary gasp, in the same wholehearted way she had wept as a child.

  She splayed the fingers of one hand across the corkboard to support herself as she hunched slightly forward and let go of the sheaf of clippings still to be arranged and tacked to the corkboard. They drifted away, riding the currents of heat rising from the radiators, settling widely over the classroom floor. With her free hand she covered her eyes, as if, in blocking the light, she might also disappear.

  Agnes wasn’t even aware of the new quality of silence in the room, where the children had stopped their copy work to look at her. Just for a few moments, in fact, she was bereft of faith in anything at all. Everything in the world was beside the point. In the chalk-powdered light of that second-grade schoolroom, Agnes temporarily lost the assumption of the reasonableness of human existence. She bent more deeply at the waist, her supporting hand well above her head as she still braced herself against the wall in an attempt not to fall. Nora Alexander, one of Agnes’s best students, took it upon herself to go across the hall and get Miss Dameron from the third-grade class.

  Agnes went home and spent the afternoon in bed, although she knew she wasn’t ill. She was afraid, though, to turn around in her thoughts and face head-on the state of mind awaiting her. She remained in bed, and she did still feel fuzzy-headed and ill-defined, as though she were a person who has been crayoned into a coloring book by some child who can’t keep within the lines.

  The war itself was a horror she had already encompassed as much as that was possible. She shared the communal dread and appalled regret when people in town—when anyone at all—lost children and husbands. Two years earlier Lucille Drummond Hendry’s daughter, who was Agnes’s namesake, had been on a Red Cross transport that was sunk by German submarines, and their son was stationed somewhere in the Pacific. Lucille had been Agnes’s closest friend since they were schoolgirls, and Agnes had spent two weeks in Columbus with Lucille and Davis Hendry after their daughter’s ship was reported lost. Agnes hadn’t been able to think of anything to do or to say that would offer Lucille even a bit of comfort, but Lucille had maintained an air of subdued but uncharacteristic serenity, in part, Agnes guessed, so that she would be left alone. A loss like Lucille’s and Davis’s was the most terrible thing that could happen to civilians during the war.

  Claytor, Betts, and Howard were all still in the U.S., all three safe for the time being, but Agnes couldn’t shake herself loose from dread on their behalf, and particularly on behalf of Dwight, who was stationed in England. It was beyond her to imagine an orderly life at Scofields if Dwight didn’t return. After Warren’s death, it was Dwight’s stern expectation of family loyalty, of family responsibility, that held them in their early and fragile reorganized family orbit.

  Agnes had come to grips with the fact that grief, unlike sympathy or even sorrow, is not selfless. The children had taken their leave without seeming to understand that they might not return. The three boys, at least, might not ever see Scofields again, might not see Washburn again, might not, in fact, ever see her again, and yet they had gone anyway. Agnes knew full well that such a complaint was absurd on the face of it, but it was one of those ideas she couldn’t displace. She had tried to be stern with herself: Dwight and Claytor and Howard and Betts—any one of them—could walk out the door any morning of the world and be hit by a bus! It was foolish to borrow trouble!

  Bernice Dameron had phoned Lily from school to be sure someone would look in on Agnes, and, of course, when Lily Butler came over from next door, Agnes didn’t discuss anything about the anxious drama spinning through her thoughts. Nothing that Agnes might say along the lines of what she was thinking would be any surprise at all to Lily, and nothing Lily might reply would be the slightest help to Agnes. She and Lily knew instinctively never to admit the worst to each other. Lily was concerned and well intentioned but betrayed her impatience when it was clear there was nothing physically wrong with Agnes, that there was really nothing to be done to make Agnes feel better.

  “Wouldn’t you like me to bring you some supper?” Lily
asked, in the very way of asking that made it out of the question for Agnes to allow her to do so. But Agnes wasn’t hungry, anyway, and felt well enough to get something for herself if she wanted it. Lily could handle almost anything with flair. She organized bond rallies, the Ladies Aid Society, and Garden Club meetings with efficiency, and she presided over them with humor and an air of unruffled certainty. But she had very little talent for tolerating human weakness, and no patience at all if she suspected any sort of brewing sentimentality. She sat with Agnes for a little while, put a pitcher of water and a glass on the bedside table, then made her escape, and both women were relieved.

  The next morning Agnes got up early and stepped back into the pattern of her days. She carried on as usual, teaching the second grade at Jesser Grammar School, eating lunch with Bernice Dameron, Will’s older sister, in the cloakroom, where they sat on the boot bench with their cheese sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, idly chatting and luxuriating in furtively smoking one of the few cigarettes a day they allowed themselves with the war on, fanning the smoke out of the high transom window so they wouldn’t be caught breaking the rules. The days passed uneventfully, and after a while no one gave any thought to that strange little spell that had overtaken Mrs. Scofield at school—no one but Nora Alexander, that is. She was in love with Mrs. Scofield and believed she had saved her teacher’s life. And Agnes moved through all the hours, working hard to make the time pass by.

  Some days she stayed late in her classroom, reorganizing the supply closet, correcting workbooks, or just sitting unthinking at her desk, staring out the windows until she could scurry home too late to be expected to stop in at the Butlers’ as she had been in the habit of doing. She was stuck in a state of incuriosity, and even the energy to receive Robert’s courtly concern and Lily’s briskly assuring cheer escaped her. Agnes saw Will now and then, although she didn’t have the energy to display affection or feign interest in much he had to say. But sex was the one thing she did hunger for; she found herself dwelling on the idea of Will’s hands touching her, of his pale torso and his long, strong legs.